Quote

Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency.

Herbert Read

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Herbert Read
Age: 74 †
Born: 1893
Born: November 4
Died: 1968
Died: June 12
Anarchist
Art Historian
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Muscoates
North Yorkshire
Sir Herbert Edward Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Read
Herbert Edward Read
Fall
Value
Finger
Social
Nation
Currency
Graph
Keep
Records
Decline
Graphs
Art
Wise
Anxious
Exports
Always
Nations
Significant
Index
Values
Fingers
Statesman
Eye
Destiny
Statesmen
Moving
Civilization
Vitality

More quotes by Herbert Read

Image
My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.
Herbert Read
Image
An enormous amount of art and literature is erotic in the sense that it stimulates vague sexual emotions, but it has no pornographic intention or effect because it leaves everything to the imagination. The consumer has to invent his own images, and it is felt, I do not know with what justification, that there is no harm in this.
Herbert Read
Image
The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
Herbert Read
Image
It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.
Herbert Read
Image
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
Herbert Read
Image
Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.
Herbert Read
Image
The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury for the sculptor it is a necessity.
Herbert Read
Image
But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
Image
Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
Herbert Read
Image
Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
Image
But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.
Herbert Read
Image
Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
Herbert Read
Image
That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.
Herbert Read
Image
It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.
Herbert Read
Image
In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.
Herbert Read
Image
The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.
Herbert Read
Image
Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
Herbert Read
Image
The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.
Herbert Read
Image
Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
Herbert Read
Image
To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.
Herbert Read